In St. Paul's Ward 2 city council race, the results are in! And the loser is... negative campaigning?
In the final weeks of the Ward 2 campaign, glossy mailers sent out by the St. Paul Regional Labor Federation questioned Rebecca Noecker’s credibility as a candidate, and mailers sent out by the St. Paul Police Federation were equally critical of Darren Tobolt. Yet another set of mailers criticized Bill Hosko.
Ranked-choice elections.
Organizers with FairVote have questioned whether the mailers backfired and cost Tobolt some important second-choice votes in the six-way race, which was decided by ranked-choice ballot.
Just take a look at the math. Four candidates -- Hosko, Pat Fearing, Sharon Anderson and Michael C. Johnson -- did not get enough votes on Nov. 3 to be considered potential winners, splitting about 20 percent of first-choice ballots between them.
Ramsey County elections officials spent Monday morning tabulating the number of votes for Noecker and Tobolt from the second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth choices on ballots cast for those four.
The ballot redistribution helped Noecker nearly double her 183-vote lead over Tobolt. At the end of counting, Noecker had reached 2,782 votes, with Tobolt at 2,444.
As of Monday morning’s initial hand count, Noecker held 2,391 first-choice votes, and Tobolt had 2,208. So second-choice votes gave her a big boost.
In particular, Noecker picked up roughly 170 second-choice votes from the ballots cast for Hosko, while the four other candidates split about 130 Hosko ballots, said Chuck Repke, a Noecker volunteer. Some 300 Hosko ballots had no second-choice selection on them.
It would be difficult to prove outright that Hosko's fans were so turned off by the anti-Hosko or anti-Noecker mailers that they pulled their second-choice votes from Tobolt, but the possibility certainly exists.
“I have no hard feelings about the attack pieces against me,” said Noecker, noting that mailers were sent out by political action committees and not sent out by candidates themselves. “They’re going to go in my scrap book as a reminder that negativity doesn’t have to get you down.”
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